US President Barack Obama on Wednesday charted a muscular new course for the US in a turbulent world, telling the UN General Assembly in a bluntly worded speech that the US military would work with allies to dismantle the Islamic State’s “network of death” and warning Russia that it would pay for its bullying of Ukraine.
Two days after ordering airstrikes on dozens of militant targets in Syria, Obama issued a fervent call to arms against the Islamic State (IS) — the once-reluctant warrior now apparently resolved to waging a struggle against Islamic extremism for the remainder of his presidency.
“Today, I ask the world to join in this effort,” Obama said, seeking to buttress a global coalition that he said would train and equip troops to fight the group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), starve it of financial resources and halt the flow of foreign recruits to its ranks.
Photo: AFP
“Those who have joined ISIL should leave the battlefield while they can,” Obama said. “For we will not succumb to threats and we will demonstrate that the future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy.”
The brutality of the militants, he said, “forces us to look into the heart of darkness.”
Even so, Obama said, the threat from the IS was only the most urgent of an onslaught of global challenges that have given the US no choice but to take the lead — from resisting Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to coordinating a response to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa; from brokering a new unity government in Afghanistan to organizing a new campaign to confront climate change.
It was a starkly different president from the one who addressed skeptical world leaders at the General Assembly last year, two weeks after calling off a missile strike on Syria over its use of chemical weapons. In that speech, Obama offered a shrunken list of US priorities in the Middle East and showed little appetite for the charged rhetoric or interventionist policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Obama on Wednesday spoke more like a wartime leader, reaffirming his determination to work with other countries but leaving little doubt that the US would act as the ultimate guarantor of an international order that he said was under acute stress.
In addressing the Ukraine crisis, Obama used his strongest language yet, portraying Russia’s incursions as an affront to UN principles and promising to levy a cost on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He accused Russia of conspiring with Ukrainian separatists to obstruct an investigation into a downed Malaysian jetliner.
“This is a vision of the world in which might makes right; a world in which one nation’s borders can be redrawn by another and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed,” Obama said.
The 39-minute speech was also notable for what he did not say. Last year, he singled out nuclear negotiations with Iran and Syria’s civil war as two of his top priorities in the Middle East. On Wednesday, he mentioned them in only a cursory manner.
In a sign of how the fight against the IS has reordered priorities, Obama pledged to train and equip moderate rebels in Syria — something he long resisted and labeled a fantasy. He repeated calls for a political settlement to end the civil war there, acknowledging that “cynics may argue that such an outcome can never come to pass.”
With much of the day’s focus on the threat from foreign fighters, Obama took pains to address it. In an echo of the 2009 speech in Cairo that was aimed at the Islamic world in 2009, he issued a direct appeal to young Muslims, urging them to resist the blandishments of violent jihad.
“You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder,” Obama said. “Those who call you away from this path are betraying this tradition, not defending it.”
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